Short CV

I received my MS degree in Mathematics (Dipl.-Math.) in 2008 from the
Department of Mathematics at the University of Bonn.
In 2013, I finalized my PhD thesis at the Institute for Computer Science at the
University of Bonn. After working as a machine learning scientist at
the Amazon Development Center Germany in Berlin for a year, I joined the Center for Data
Science at the New York University in the end of 2014. In my position as
assistant research engineer at the Center for Data Science, I work on open
source tools for machine learning and data science.
I have been one of the core contributors of scikit-learn, a machine learning
toolkit widely used in industry and academia, for several years, and I have
authored and contributed to a number of open source projects related to machine
learning.
You can find my full CV here (pdf).

Research Interests

My research focuses on supervised and unsupervised learning in image data. I am
interested in extracting features for modeling image data and for
discriminative purposes using structured models. I am also particularly
interested in making machine learning and compute vision algorithm available to
researchers and practitioners and an easy-to-use way.

Current Work

My current work concerns image segmentation and object detection with weak
supervision and latent variables. Whenever I have time I write about my current work and interesting
developments in my blog: peekaboo-vision.blogspot.com

Software

PyStruct A
structured prediction framework for Python. It implements subgradient and QP
based structured SVM solvers, provides a framework for formulating structured
problems and has ready-made method for learning loopy CRFs using several
inference methods.

scikit-learn Scikit-learn
is a general purpose machine learning library in Python. I am release manager
and one of the core developers.

scikit-image Scikit-image is a
computer vision and image processing library in Python. I contributed some
segmentation algorithms.

Python wrappers for
GCO I wrote small Python wrappers that make it easier to use
the GCO energy minimization software.

CUV
library Together with Hannes Schulz and others, I am working on
this library, which provides a framework for matrix routines in CUDA and C++,
especially designed towards neural networks and Restricted Boltzmann Machines.
Using the NVidia Cuda framework it is possible to obtain speedups of 20-100
times compared with a optimized single CPU implementation. There are python
bindings available for very fast development. Often an existing Python or
Matlab project can easily be converted to the cuv library to obtain huge times
speedups without any further optimization.

Diploma Thesis

I received my Diploma in Mathematics from Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn.
My Diploma thesis belongs to the field of Arithmetic Algebraic Geometry. It is about classifying a certain kind of singularities in Affine Grassmannians of Linear Algebraic Groups over fields of arbitrary characteristic.
Its title is Singularities of Minimal Degenerations in Affine Grassmannians (pdf). Introductions are in both, German and English, but the main part of the thesis is English only.